The Passenger at Two in the Morning
A cab driver waits at the same intersection every Wednesday at 2 AM for a passenger who hasn't shown up in three months.
In twenty years of driving a cab, Old Zhou had learned to read the city by the weight of the silence between two and four in the morning. There's a particular hush that settles after the bars empty out but before the first delivery trucks start their rounds——a stretch of hours when the streets belong to nobody and the traffic lights cycle for no one. He liked those hours. They asked nothing of him.
He pulled up at the old locust tree intersection at exactly two, as he did every Wednesday. Killed the passenger light. Cracked the window. July in this city meant warm nights that smelled of dust and tree sap, the kind of air that clung to your skin and didn't let go. A water truck trundled past, its spray catching the streetlights in a fine gold mist. The road stretched out pale and empty.
He lit a cigarette and waited.
He first picked her up two summers ago, during a storm that flooded half the streets. He'd been about to call it a night when he saw her standing under the locust tree, a small figure in a dark coat holding a black umbrella that the wind kept trying to rip out of her hand. White chrysanthemums pressed against her chest.
She got in and said: Songhe Cemetery. Thirty-four kilometers, out past the city limits. He didn't ask questions. Twenty years in this job, you learn when silence is the only decent thing to offer. He turned on the heat instead. In the rearview mirror, water dripped from the ends of her silver hair and the flowers sat on her lap like something she was afraid of breaking.
She visited a grave in the east section, row seven, third from the left. Her husband's, Old Zhou figured. He never asked and she never said, but he knew. After two years of Wednesdays, you develop a kind of knowing that doesn't require words. Between them, over all those trips, they had exchanged maybe fifty sentences. He learned she had a daughter who called once a week. She learned he took his tea strong and didn't mind the heater running even in mild weather. That was the extent of it.
But he considered her the most familiar passenger he'd ever had.
Three months ago, she didn't show.
He waited twenty minutes, then thirty, then forty. The traffic light cycled through its colors fifty times. Another water truck came and went. At two-forty he started the engine and drove to the cemetery himself. He parked outside the gate but didn't go in. Just sat there, engine idling, the headlights cutting two pale tunnels into the dark. Then he turned around and drove back into the city.
The next morning he bought a newspaper and checked the obituaries. He wasn't sure what he was looking for. He didn't find it.
The second Wednesday, same thing.
The third Wednesday, he didn't go at all. He took fares instead——a man to the train station, a couple to the bar district, a kid so drunk he passed out in the back seat. He clocked out at three and lay in bed staring at the ceiling until the sun came up.
The fourth Wednesday, he was back at the intersection.
One of the other night drivers, Old Wang, spotted him there once and pulled up alongside. Asked what he was doing. Old Zhou said he was waiting for someone. Old Wang asked who. Old Zhou thought about it for a moment and said: a friend.
Old Wang didn't press. He just glanced at Old Zhou's face, which was calm and settled in a way that suggested he'd made peace with waiting a long time.
She was probably fine. That's what Old Zhou told himself. Her daughter had finally convinced her to move south, somewhere warm where the winters didn't seep into your bones. Or she was in a hospital bed somewhere, her husband's photograph on the nightstand, and she'd be back on her feet by autumn. Or maybe she'd simply changed her schedule. Thursday instead of Wednesday. Once a month instead of once a week. These things happened. People's habits shifted. It didn't have to mean anything.
Some of these explanations he believed. Some of them he was careful not to examine too closely.
He never went to the east section, row seven.
Not because he couldn't. Thirty-four kilometers. A straight shot on the ring road, maybe twenty-five minutes at this hour. He just didn't. Because as long as he didn't, nothing was certain. As long as he turned off his passenger light at that intersection every Wednesday, she might still step out from behind the locust tree with a bundle of white flowers, her coat collar turned up against the dark, and get into his cab like nothing had changed.
It had been three months. He didn't think of it as waiting. Waiting implied a known outcome——a delayed flight, a late friend, a pot coming to boil. He didn't know the outcome. He only knew that at two in the morning on a Wednesday, this was where he belonged. The moon had its place. The streetlights had theirs. The water truck had its route. And Old Zhou had the old locust tree intersection.
Tonight the intersection was quiet. He finished the last of his tea, screwed the cap back on his thermos, and set it on the passenger seat. He looked into the rearview mirror. The street behind him was empty, a dry riverbed under the sodium lights.
He switched the passenger light back on.
The signal turned green. He eased off the brake and the car rolled through the intersection. The shadow of the locust tree swept across the windshield, then the streetlights caught it and stretched it long, throwing it behind him.
The tires rolled over a crack in the asphalt, softened by the day's heat, and it made a sound——a small, muffled thump, like something closing gently.
Old Zhou didn't look back.